Image reconstruction from projections suffers from an inherent difficulty: there are different images that have identical projections in any finite number of directions. However, by identifying the type of image that is likely to occur in an application area, one can design algorithms that may be efficacious in that area even when the number of projections is small. One such approach uses total variation minimization. We report on an algorithm based on this approach, and show that sometimes it produces medically-desirable reconstructions in computerized tomography (CT) even from a small number of projections. However, we also demonstrate that such a reconstruction is not guaranteed to provide the medically-relevant information: when data are collected by an actually CT scanner for a small number projections, the noise in such data may very well result in a tumor in the brain not being visible in the reconstruction.

We study the convergence of a class of accelerated perturbation-resilient block-iterative projection methods for solving systems of linear equations. We prove convergence to a fixed point of an operator even in the presence of summable perturbations of the iterates, irrespective of the consistency of the linear system. For a consistent system, the limit point is a solution of the system. In the inconsistent case, the symmetric version of our method converges to a weighted least squares solution. Perturbation resilience is utilized to approximate the minimum of a convex functional subject to the equations. A main contribution, as compared to previously published approaches to achieving similar aims, is a more than an order of magnitude speed-up, as demonstrated by applying the methods to problems of image reconstruction from projections. In addition, the accelerated algorithms are illustrated to be better, in a strict sense provided by the method of statistical hypothesis testing, than their unaccelerated versions for the task of detecting small tumors in the brain from X-ray CT projection data.

Much recent activity is aimed at reconstructing images from a few projections. Images in any application area are not random samples of all possible images, but have some common attributes. If these attributes are reflected in the smallness of an objective function, then the aim of satisfying the projections can be complemented with the aim of having a small objective value. One widely investigated objective function is total variation (TV), it leads to quite good reconstructions from a few mathematically ideal projections. However, when applied to measured projections that only approximate the mathematical ideal, TV-based reconstructions from a few projections may fail to recover important features in the original images. It has been suggested that this may be due to TV not being the appropriate objective function and that one should use the ℓ(1)-norm of the Haar transform instead. The investigation reported in this paper contradicts this. In experiments simulating computerized tomography (CT) data collection of the head, reconstructions whose Haar transform has a small ℓ(1)-norm are not more efficacious than reconstructions that have a small TV value. The search for an objective function that provides diagnostically efficacious reconstructions from a few CT projections remains open.